Graeme Galloway will be praying the sun also rises for him on Monday. It will mean he has survived running with the bulls at the Pamplona festival again.
The business studies teacher from Hampton school in south-west London has dodged the marauding bulls in the northern Spanish town 60 times over the past 26 years.
This year he has taken three colleagues to Pamplona, although they are not joining the enciero (bull run) made famous by Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. They will watch as he joins more than a thousand runners, mostly men, dressed in white with red kerchiefs.
Since his first time in 1976, at the age of 18, Mr Galloway has returned almost every year since. Such is his passion for the famous San Fermin fiesta that he switched to the private sector as holidays in early July allow him to attend. “It’s simply the biggest thrill on earth,” he said. “Running with the bulls is the most incredible feeling.”
His closest call was in 1982 near the entrance to a tunnel on the course. He was in the sights of a bull that had just killed another runner. “I just made myself as thin as possible against the wall and it was distracted by someone waving a newspaper at the last second,” he recalled.
Up to a million people have travelled to Pamplona to join the week-long festival, ending on Sunday.
Earlier this week, three runners, including one Briton, were gored. Fourteen people have died this century in Pamplona bull runs. The last death occurred in 1995.
www.pamplona.co.uk
